Question Seven

SECTION B.

Answer TWO questions from this section. Each question carries 30 marks. You are advised to spend about one hour on each answer.

He read all six before he looked at any of them twice. Mr Ferrante said you read all six first, every time, even if you knew which you would answer from the first line, because the one you thought you would answer was not always the one you could.

7. In March 1976 the Viceroy of the River Plate refused to sign the decrees of the junta, and was held under arrest in the Casa Rosada until 1983. The King refused to recognise the junta. Which refusal mattered more?

8. Why did the River Plate become a realm of the Crown in 1910, and not before?

9. “Congress suspended, and the Crown silent.” How far is this a fair account of the Philippines between 1975 and 1978?

10. “Written for a King who cannot act.” How well has the Regency Act 1811 served the Realm?

11. How far did the May Day Bombings change the relationship between the Crown and the people of the Realm?

12. “In Malaya the Crown is a Crown that does nothing.” Discuss.

He read them all again.

Then he went back to seven.

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He had known he would. He had known since the list on the steps, 1930, 1955, 1976, and since the card with the red ink on the back, and probably since he was nine, when he had found the book in his father’s study in London, on the bottom shelf, behind the others, a thin grey book in Spanish with a picture on the cover of a pink building with soldiers in front of it, and had taken it down, and had been told by his father, from the door, quite gently, not that one, Frederick, and had put it back.

He had never asked his father about 1976.

His father had never told him. Not once. Not at the lodge at Lac du Roi in the summers, where his father told him about almost everything, slowly, in the evenings, on the porch, the way he told the arrivals at Union Station, one thing after another in order. Not at Solliden. Not on the telephone on Sundays at four. He had told him about the Charter and the May Day Bombings and the year he had become King at twenty-five. He had told him about Ottawa and Pretoria and Manila. He had never said a word about the Plate in 1976.

Frederick had read about it. Everybody had. It was in the Register, in the article on the Plate, in a sentence he could have said with his eyes shut, because Theo had made a card of it and read it out to him on the bus in May in his tremendous herald’s voice: The King’s refusal is the single act that most explains the Crown’s standing in the Plate today.

He looked at the question.

Which refusal mattered more?

He turned to the back page of the answer booklet, where it said PLANNING. This page will not be marked., and drew a line down the middle with the ruler, and wrote at the top of the left side THE VICEROY, and at the top of the right side THE KING.

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THE VICEROY.

In the room. In the Casa Rosada. They had to come to him.

Refused first. 24 March.

Refused to sign. Refused to appoint. Two things.

Arrested. In his own house. Seven years.

Every day for seven years. A refusal that had to be done again every morning.

Could have been killed. 30,000 were.

Nobody would have known for a week.

THE KING.

In London. Six thousand miles.

Refused to recognise. After.

Cost: relations broken. Britain and the Realm.

Made it the Crown’s and not one man’s.

Could not have been arrested.

Was 29.

He looked at the last line on the right. He had not meant to write it. He did not cross it out, because the page would not be marked.

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Behind him, in the panel of the left-hand door, the top of Castellanos’s head had not moved.

He had looked twice. He would not look again. He made himself think of the head as a fact, like the clock, like the heat: a thing that was there and would go on being there and that he could do nothing about until twelve. Castellanos was outside the door. Whatever had brought him there, he had been told no, and had said right, and was standing there now to be the first thing at the door when the door opened. That was what it meant. It did not mean anything else, because Castellanos did not do things that meant anything else.

He picked up his pen.

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Both refusals were necessary. But the Viceroy’s mattered more, because it was made in the room where the decision was, and the King’s was not.

He looked at the first sentence for a long time. He thought about crossing out necessary, because the Board’s examiners were said to dislike candidates who said both, and Mr Ferrante said that saying both was what you did when you were frightened of saying one. But it was true, and he left it.

On 24 March 1976 the armed forces removed the government of the River Plate. A junta could take the ministries and the radio and the streets, and did. It could not take the Crown, because the Crown in the Plate is not a building or a law. It is a man in a house. The junta needed the Viceroy to sign its decrees, because without his signature they were not law but orders, and an order can only be obeyed, where a law can be relied on. The Viceroy refused to sign. He also refused to appoint the members of the junta to office, which meant that they held no office: they were only the men who happened to be in the buildings.

This was a refusal made face to face. The source on this is the Viceroy’s own account, written in 1984, which says that the decrees were brought to his study by two colonels and laid on his desk, and that he read them, and gave them back. He did not make a speech. The colonels took the decrees away and came back the next day with soldiers.

He stopped.

He did not know if the Viceroy’s account was a source the Board would accept. It was in the grey book in Spanish on the bottom shelf of his father’s study in London. He had read it at last at fourteen, in the long summer after the eighth grade, by himself, sitting on the floor of the study with his back against the shelves, while his father was in a meeting in the next room, and had put it back afterwards in exactly the place it had come from, behind the others, and never said.

He left it in.

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The King refused to recognise the junta in the same week. This mattered a great deal. It meant that Britain and the Realm and the other realms broke off relations with Buenos Aires, and that the junta could never claim that the Crown was with it, and that when the junta fell in 1983 there was a Crown to go back to which had not been dirtied. The Register says that the King’s refusal is the single act that most explains the Crown’s standing in the Plate today. In the sense that it is the act most people remember, this is right.

But the King refused in London. He was six thousand miles away. Nobody could arrest him. The worst that could happen to him was that the junta would say things about him on the radio. When he refused, he was refusing something that had already been refused, in the Casa Rosada, by the man who was there. The King’s refusal followed his representative’s. It was the right thing to follow. But it followed.

He read that over. His hand was hot on the paper. He wiped it on his trouser leg and went on.

The Viceroy’s refusal was not made once. It was made every day for seven years. Every morning that he was in the Casa Rosada under guard and had not signed, he had refused again. The junta could have killed him. It killed thirty thousand people, most of whom had refused much less. Nobody outside would have known for a week. He must have known this every morning when he woke up.

The King’s refusal made the Viceroy’s refusal the Crown’s, and not one man’s. Without it the Viceroy would have been a brave judge under arrest. With it he was the King’s representative under arrest, and everyone knew whose house he was being kept in. So the King’s refusal mattered.

But a refusal is a thing done in a room, to someone’s face. Only one of them was in the room.

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He looked up.

The clock over the doors said eight minutes past ten, which meant four and a half past. Four and a half past ten here. Four and a half past eleven there.

He had been writing for seventeen minutes and had three sides. Theo, beside him, was on his second question already, or his first; Frederick could not tell which, and did not look. Somewhere behind him June sniffed, and went on. A long way off, at the very back, somebody dropped a pen and it rolled along the boards and stopped, and nobody picked it up, because you were not allowed to leave your desk to pick up a pen, and the person who had dropped it would have to put their hand up and wait for Mr Lumsden to bring them another.

Mr Lumsden, behind the table, beside the grey box, was writing in his black book again.

Frederick watched him for a moment. The pencil moved, and stopped, and Mr Lumsden looked at his watch, and wrote one more thing, a number, and closed the book.

He looked at the head in the glass panel. It had moved.

Not away. Aside. A few inches to the left, as a man moves to let somebody else stand beside him at a window. And beside it now, just showing over the lower edge of the glass, there was another head, lower, darker, with the hair pinned up, the way somebody pins their hair up who has done it the same way every morning for twenty years and does not need a mirror.

He knew whose it was before the handle went down.

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He looked back at his paper.

Only one of them was in the room.

He wrote the next sentence very carefully, because his hand did not want to write it.

This is why I think the Viceroy’s refusal mattered more. The King could only agree with it. I do not think this makes the King’s refusal less. I think it is what a King in London is for.

The handle of the left-hand door went down, once, against the bolt, and stopped, and went up.

Ninety pens stopped again, in the ripple, from the back.

Mr Lumsden put his black book in his pocket, and took off his glasses, and stood up.